This was definitely one of your recommendations. I don't think you ever played me this album, but you assured me it was superb. I must have got it from the Oxford Street Virgin Megastore, because it still has its cellophane wrapper (price label £ 4.99, also with a sticker from C.M. Distribution in Harrogate). It's in all-round mint condition, because… well, I doubt I've played it for 20 years.
The thing is, I remember being underwhelmed by the album at the time I got it. My mental picture of it was of a kind of soppy Al-Stewart-style wistfulness. That was wrong, sorry. However, I can imagine what put me off the first three songs — the so-called 'Emigrant trilogy'. It's all that stuff about the "green fields of Amerikay", leaving the "Shamrock shore" and "I have a wee lassie I fain would take with me". I'm sure it plays well in Boston, and it's far from being as bad as this but it still sounds pretty clichéd to me.
I like Side 2 a lot more. In particular Romanian Song, with Lucienne Purcell singing and sounding like those Mystère des Voix Bulgares records some time before they reached the UK. Great bouzouki and hurdy gurdy playing, too. Apparently it's in 5/16 or some weird time signature (I've put the sleeve notes away now), as is the following track, Paidushko Horo. Good stuff, which I've overlooked for a long time.
Google found me this fan appreciation of the album.
I saw Andy Irvine play a few songs earlier this year at the protest folk music event that Billy Bragg presented at the Barbican. It was an odd event in the context of the BBC Folk Britannia season, because it seemed to imply that the biggest influence on British protest music was Woody Guthrie. And Donovan was once more re-writing history and his role in it.
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